A blog that tackles issues on basic education (in the Philippines and the United States) including early childhood education, the teaching profession, math and science education, medium of instruction, poverty, and the role of research and higher education.

"Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labor in every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things which we create in common." - Albert Einstein

Saturday, October 11, 2014

What to Think and How to Know

Yes, it is the old debate regarding what a classroom needs to focus on: content versus skills. This debate must really stop because it is a false dichotomy. We need both. The much more important discussion is how one relates to the other so that the time spent by a child inside the classroom becomes much more worthwhile. Paul Cancellieri, a middle school science teacher, wrote the following in TeachHub.com:

"Paring down state science standards in favor of more depth and greater comprehension" does not really mean cutting content. Greater depth also means deeper content. Hence, paring down here implies that the old curriculum is a mile wide but only an inch thick. The volume of content is therefore decided not just by the breadth alone but also the depth. Increasing the depth while decreasing the breadth does not necessarily decrease the volume. In fact, it can get bigger, if we make, for instance, the depth 4 times deeper and the breadth only half as much.

In the discussion of content and skills, it may likewise be useful to find out how each one is acquired. For example, how does a child develop scientific thinking (skills) and how does a child acquire scientific knowledge (content)? The previous article on this blog, "Developing Scientific Thinking" offers a clue. Content seems to be taught while skills are caught. A teacher can provide knowledge then through direct instruction while helping a child develop skills by example.

The main reason why content versus skills is a false dichotomy is the fact that these two are related. Determining the relationship between the two, content and skills, is useful for designing a more effective curriculum. One area that has been recently studied is the relationship between vocabulary (content) and reading comprehension (skill). A paper scheduled to be published in Child Development examines how scores in vocabulary and reading comprehension tests vary with years of instruction. The paper, "Developmental Relations Between Vocabulary Knowledge and Reading Comprehension: A Latent Change Score Modeling Study", has the following abstract:

This is a longitudinal study involving about three hundred students from first to fourth grade in elementary schools in the Leon County School District in Florida. By following the vocabulary and reading comprehension scores of the students through four years of elementary schooling the following possible relationships between vocabulary and reading comprehension can be ascertained:

Correlated but uncoupled - In this scenario, children develop both vocabulary and reading comprehension at the same time. Growth in both are correlated but not because one causes the other, but because they both rely on an outside third factor.

Bidirectional coupling - In this scenario, the two, vocabulary and comprehension, work side by side, causing growth in each other.

And as the above abstract states, this study finds a unidirectional coupling (Vocabulary to Comprehension). The authors conclude, "...this study supports the idea that growth in reading comprehension depends in part on vocabulary knowledge." The authors also make it clear that due to the study's limitations, a bidirectional coupling can not be completely dismissed, but it is certain here that content affects skills, providing us with a strong evidence that content versus skills is truly a useless debate.

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About Me

Angel C. de Dios, Ph.D., is currently an associate professor of chemistry at Georgetown University. At Georgetown, he has been teaching General Chemistry since 1995 in addition to graduate courses in molecular spectroscopy and quantum chemistry. His research interests include nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, protein structure determination, anti-malarial drugs, and math and science education. He was a recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the Georgetown College Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. A member of PAASE (Philippine American Academy of Science and Engineering), he helped the residents of Paete, Laguna incorporate computers and the Internet into their public schools.